Here’s everything you ever wanted to know about America in one interaction (story shamelessly stolen from a Dear Friend)

Dear Friend now works as customer service for a cruise company after 3 years of unemployment/ temping. She makes less than a living wage and decidedly less than she did pre-layoff. But it’s full-time, permanent, with benefits. It’s a unicorn job.

Customer is worrying that they will be “stuck on a boat with nothing to eat but soup and bread for a week”. Dear Friend is eating soup and bread, because that is what she can afford for lunch. She eats soup and bread a lot. Soup is cheap. You can make buckets of it and the liquid makes you feel full even if there isn’t a ton of calories in it.

America* is a land where rich people complain to poor people and poor people have to listen and respond with cheerfulness. “Of course, you (great pimple on the ass of society) won’t be stuck eating just bread and soup. That would be awful”.

*I am sure that’s true in just about every country. But we like to pretend all our poor people are lazy, government-teat sucking layabouts, not full-time workers.